Blizzard fixes Diablo III gold duplication bug, but the damage may be done

Yesterday's release of the 1.0.8 patch for Diablo IIIfixed many known bugs, but it also added an exploit that let savvy users create in-game gold out of thin air, wreaking havoc on the in-game economy and real-money auction house.

By cancelling a transaction while it was still being processed, players on the 1.0.8 patch would get twice as much gold returned to them, creating an easy source of infinite in-game currency. Blizzard made players aware of the duplication bug last night and shut down the auction houses to limit the damage. A fix was pushed live to servers at 10:40pm PDT, according to an update to the official forum post addressing the issue.

Duplication bugs are nothing new in the Diablo series, of course. Still, duplication issues are potentially more serious in Diablo III, since the in-game auction houses let duplicated gold be traded for other players' items or even real money. Diablo III's persistent server connection was supposed to prevent issues like this through centralized control of players' item lists, but yesterday's bug proves it's not totally foolproof.

Rather than rolling back the servers by a day to erase any sign of the duplicated gold, Blizzard has decided to instead punish the "relatively few players" it says made use of the bug with "fairly limited" effect in the wider game. "We feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning."

That decision has created a great deal of controversy among some players who say Blizzard's actions will do nothing to fix the flood of duplicated gold that caused the value of legitimate gold to plummet in a very short time yesterday. "People with the infinite source of gold today purchased items non-stop for hours," forum poster Chillaxin noted in a popular thread of the D3 forums. "Quadrillions of gold flooded into the economy and was divided among the entire player-base to anyone selling items. You may have stopped the dupers but there is severe permanent damage if you don't rollback everything."

"The economy that existed was at best 'okay.' Now it is dreadful," forum user Buriz added. "I myself have no more use for my gold. The [auction house] died today when the rollback didn't happen."

This is just another example in a long line of reasons why we're moving our savings out of Diablo III gold and into precious beryllium.

Promoted Comments

Damage is done. And it was hardly a "few" players that benefitted...everybody I knew was unsocketing gems (after selling everything else they could scrounge up), for instance, to take advantage of the spike in prices (up to 150M for top-level gems, which were going for about 25M the day before). Then the smart ones swiftly moved as much as they could to their Bnet balance (or PayPal).

Overall, it looks like the value of gold relative to dollars dropped by somewhere around half yesterday in just a few hours. You can nail the dupers, ban their accounts, and remove their gold...but most of it flowed out into the wider economy.

It would have made much more sense just to do a rollback, I'd imagine most players would prefer losing one day of EXP progress to losing the next two months of gold progress (which is what this day of inflation did, more or less).

I'd say Blizzard needs to start using Bitcoin. Unique hash on each coin would prevent duplication

I still remember when I first saw my 6x Zod Polearm in D2 that resulted from some crazy dup scam. In all my hundreds of hours of play, I never saw anything better than a Ber (rune 30 of 33). Shame, because it would have been fun to have some of the elite runewords (I really wanted some Enigma armor for my Zookeeper).

Damage is done. And it was hardly a "few" players that benefitted...everybody I knew was unsocketing gems (after selling everything else they could scrounge up), for instance, to take advantage of the spike in prices (up to 150M for top-level gems, which were going for about 25M the day before). Then the smart ones swiftly moved as much as they could to their Bnet balance (or PayPal).

Overall, it looks like the value of gold relative to dollars dropped by somewhere around half yesterday in just a few hours. You can nail the dupers, ban their accounts, and remove their gold...but most of it flowed out into the wider economy.

It would have made much more sense just to do a rollback, I'd imagine most players would prefer losing one day of EXP progress to losing the next two months of gold progress (which is what this day of inflation did, more or less).

I skipped Diablo III but I am amazed that they decided against a server rollback. As a player of many other MMO's during my gaming time, I would gladly give up a day's progress in any of them in order to ensure the longer term health of the game economy which sounds like it wasn't doing all that well to begin with.

I love Hogman... That said, I'm glad I got this game for essentially free, it was fun to play with friends but the string of problems have prevented it from being fun. Then again I don't particularly find D2 or torchlight fun either.

I'd say Blizzard needs to start using Bitcoin. Unique hash on each coin would prevent duplication

I still remember when I first saw my 6x Zod Polearm in D2 that resulted from some crazy dup scam. In all my hundreds of hours of play, I never saw anything better than a Ber (rune 30 of 33). Shame, because it would have been fun to have some of the elite runewords (I really wanted some Enigma armor for my Zookeeper).

Guild Wars 2 early on had a currency bug regarding some merchant items were at like 1/10th of their value. They did the same thing as Blizzard, by focusing on the big offenders. But as others have mentioned, the money that trickles out to legitimate players still leaves a scar on the economy for awhile. Rollback would have been a better choice.

Now if only this would prompt them to allow it to be played offline/LAN.....

This is one of the reasons I haven't bothered bothered getting this game. It still makes me laugh that Blizzard's contribution to the PS4 will be an old PC game that wasn't all that good to begin with based on many reviews. They used to be a great PC video game company. What happened to them?

Wait, people still play this game? Worst $60 I've ever spent (FTR, I passed on SimCity).

Yes, I'm still pissed.

I completed the game and had a good time doing so. Then I completed it again on a higher difficulty level, and that was it.

I think that was worth my money. Did you expect this to be some sort of World of Warcraft like thing?

I agree - I expect that in a "good" game I'll get my money's worth out of one play through. If I replay anything that's a bonus.

Not sure why there's this expectation of lifelong enjoyment...

A single play through wasn't really 'finishing' the game though, at least I didn't feel like I finished until I hit the inferno brick wall in act 2 when I was at 60 (no idea if this has changed... i stopped playing shortly after launch. I agree that it felt like I got my money's worth out of the game for sure. Sadly some people's expectations were Diablo 2 but moar! and the fact the game didn't provide them with >= the same 'playtime satisfaction' meant from a relative value they didn't like it.

In a way, i'm glad it's not, i don't have time for that

shame to hear about the eco, i'm curious how much the price percolation has affected the economy as a whole... the data Blizz must be getting out of this would be most interesting.

So essentially Blizzard is arresting the counterfeiter with the bans but letting all the counterfeit money stay in the system.

That's a broken economy.

People earned fake money for items that would not have sold are the winners. Especially if Blizzard lets the transactions still occur.

People that earned gold legitimately are the losers.

Not to mention all the market fluctuation of Gems that people have talked about. Creating a Gem Bubble.

Gems are just gold, really. The bulk of the cost of the gem is just the jeweler fees. The biggest thing driving the gem economy in softcore, I think, was their use as a medium of exchange (allowing you to sell and buy gold indirectly at the "true" exchange rate due to the price floor on direct gold sales).

Yesterday was no different, but the duping caused a spike as people tried to cash in FAST.

Wait, people still play this game? Worst $60 I've ever spent (FTR, I passed on SimCity).

Yes, I'm still pissed.

I completed the game and had a good time doing so. Then I completed it again on a higher difficulty level, and that was it.

I think that was worth my money. Did you expect this to be some sort of World of Warcraft like thing?

An expectation that I see, especially in less-moderated forums, is something along the lines that D3 should've given them at least 3000 hours of compelling, fascinating entertainment; this is a bit of paraphrased hyperbole, but I think it's pretty close to what I see in other forums. This is generally because people remember playing D2 for far longer than they actually did (though to be fair, people STILL play D2).

I can see valid complaints, though. The maps are significantly less random than D2's, which doesn't seem like it should matter, but it does. And the always-on requirement can be really annoying; I've heard that was because people kept asking to not have differentiated characters (off-line/LAN vs battle.net), and they went a bit too far in that direction.

Now, I got D3 for free because I did the annual pass for WoW, and I greatly enjoyed it. I'd've paid $60 for it, most likely, and been reasonably satisfied. Like you, I finished normal and Nightmare, and I'm on Act 3 Hell, and I occasionally take Druss out to hack through some demons, but I haven't even gotten my barbarian to 60. Since I'm already playing WoW, I don't see the need for another gear-grind game, but I haven't uninstalled it, either.

Wait, people still play this game? Worst $60 I've ever spent (FTR, I passed on SimCity).

Yes, I'm still pissed.

I completed the game and had a good time doing so. Then I completed it again on a higher difficulty level, and that was it.

I think that was worth my money. Did you expect this to be some sort of World of Warcraft like thing?

I think a lot of people just played D2 longer and held D3 to that standard. D2 had more grind to it. (especially at launch of D3), and it had harder to get items, and arguably a better map generation system (a lot of the maps in 3 have the exits in the same spots no matter how often you generate). I guess people wanted more akin to a reskin of D2 than Blizzard messing with the formula.

Some people's lack of expected play time may simply be from the game automating things, making things more accessible, and making it so you don't have to constantly re roll if you want to see a new build

Towards the end of the time I played D2 though... people would just look up guides on how to build their characters online that were min/maxed and not many people really thought about it anyway (so blizzard just does this for you in D3). Many people were just doing the same boss runs over and over and often automating this to get items to spam the chat with LTS or TRADE (so blizzard made an auctionhouse, and elite packs to stop always doing boss runs). .

I think the biggest thing I missed was grabbing some pizza and beer and LANing... but even if that was in D3... most of the people I know nowadays would rather just play online from the safety of their own home anyway ;_;

A rollback would still have issues because real money ends up getting involved thanks to the auction house, though a mass refund could work. All thousands of transactions. Honestly, they just broke the game with no way back.

I'm curious to know how much this affected Blizzards cash accounts. It seems like everyone is forgetting that you could exchange gold for real cash. Unlimited gold = unlimited cash. Does this mean that this is the first time in game currency being counterfeited has turned into USD being counterfeited? Just think of all the implications........

I'm curious to know how much this affected Blizzards cash accounts. It seems like everyone is forgetting that you could exchange gold for real cash. Unlimited gold = unlimited cash. Does this mean that this is the first time in game currency being counterfeited has turned into USD being counterfeited? Just think of all the implications........

I wasn't aware you could trade gold for cash. I know you can sell/buy things for real money, but I don't believe you can just flat out trade gold for cash.

I'm curious to know how much this affected Blizzards cash accounts. It seems like everyone is forgetting that you could exchange gold for real cash. Unlimited gold = unlimited cash. Does this mean that this is the first time in game currency being counterfeited has turned into USD being counterfeited? Just think of all the implications........

You don't buy gold from Blizzard, you buy it from other players who post it for sale.

Now if only this would prompt them to allow it to be played offline/LAN.....

This is one of the reasons I haven't bothered bothered getting this game. It still makes me laugh that Blizzard's contribution to the PS4 will be an old PC game that wasn't all that good to begin with based on many reviews. They used to be a great PC video game company. What happened to them?

I'm curious to know how much this affected Blizzards cash accounts. It seems like everyone is forgetting that you could exchange gold for real cash. Unlimited gold = unlimited cash. Does this mean that this is the first time in game currency being counterfeited has turned into USD being counterfeited? Just think of all the implications........

You don't buy gold from Blizzard, you buy it from other players who post it for sale.

Right. So what happened is that Blizzard got a 15% cut of everybody who actually laid plastic down to try and cash in on the rush.

Ignoring for a moment that it was an auction house bug that caused this, duping like this would probably run much more rampant without the server connection. Here, they are able to take the AH down, take the servers down, they even had the option to roll back everything if they chose...whereas with a "traditional" game the duping would have run on unchecked until a patch was issued.

Now if only this would prompt them to allow it to be played offline/LAN.....

This is one of the reasons I haven't bothered bothered getting this game. It still makes me laugh that Blizzard's contribution to the PS4 will be an old PC game that wasn't all that good to begin with based on many reviews. They used to be a great PC video game company. What happened to them?

Last I checked the GAH and RMAH were both still down. Do we actually know they can't rollback / refund everything that happened yesterday in terms of items and gold and dollars while still maintaining EXP gains, or is Ars just speculating?

A rollback would still have issues because real money ends up getting involved thanks to the auction house, though a mass refund could work. All thousands of transactions. Honestly, they just broke the game with no way back.

There is some delay in the Paypal transactions built in to fight fraud. They could have rollbacked easily.

Last I checked the GAH and RMAH were both still down. Do we actually know they can't rollback / refund everything that happened yesterday in terms of items and gold and dollars while still maintaining EXP gains, or is Ars just speculating?

They do have the built in rollback request they use frequently for compromised accounts. Before they would take a snapshot of your character every 2-3 days. I think they brought it down to every 24 hours now.

In WoW if any gold was taken, a lot of times that gold is lost, but you can get your items sent back to you.

I'm curious to know how much this affected Blizzards cash accounts. It seems like everyone is forgetting that you could exchange gold for real cash. Unlimited gold = unlimited cash. Does this mean that this is the first time in game currency being counterfeited has turned into USD being counterfeited? Just think of all the implications........

You don't buy gold from Blizzard, you buy it from other players who post it for sale.

Right. So what happened is that Blizzard got a 15% cut of everybody who actually laid plastic down to try and cash in on the rush.

Ignoring for a moment that it was an auction house bug that caused this, duping like this would probably run much more rampant without the server connection. Here, they are able to take the AH down, take the servers down, they even had the option to roll back everything if they chose...whereas with a "traditional" game the duping would have run on unchecked until a patch was issued.

I agree completely. It's not like the game code was stealing money - one or more assholes found a way to cheat and messed up the economy enough that Blizzard had to suspend trading.

Ignoring for a moment that it was an auction house bug that caused this, duping like this would probably run much more rampant without the server connection. Here, they are able to take the AH down, take the servers down, they even had the option to roll back everything if they chose...whereas with a "traditional" game the duping would have run on unchecked until a patch was issued.

I agree completely. It's not like the game code was stealing money - one or more assholes found a way to cheat and messed up the economy enough that Blizzard had to suspend trading.

Saying this is Blizzard's "fault" is stupid.

I find the truth is somewhere in-between. I support the online-only so the servers can host inventory and prevent the most egregious duping and cheating. This has worked well, duping issues came out of rollbacks, not because online-only failed.

However, I will say I find it strange that a bug like that made it to the production server and that it wasn't found in QA before release. The steps are very simple and straightforward. So I can see laying some blame on Blizzard for what seems like a lack of QA.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.